Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – August 2017

You can really feel how time actually flies if you have attended the Azure Logic Apps Live webcast from the Logic Apps team. It feels just like yesterday when the team came online and presented a bunch of updates for the month of July and in no matter of time, here they were today (August 22) to present the next set of updates. I’ve always been fascinated by the commitment from the Logic Apps team in rolling out new features, organizing these monthly webcasts and responding to queries on the Twitter channel. Right, now on to the Jeff Hollan and Kevin Lam show!!! (Credits to Eldert Grootenboer for terming this during the webinar!)

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

Azure Event Grid – The newest and hottest kid in town; technical preview version was released by Microsoft on August 16th.

What is Azure Event Grid??

Azure Event Grid is the event-based routing as a service offering from Microsoft that aligns with their “Serverless” strategy. Azure Event Grid simplifies the Event Consumption logic by making it more of a “Push” mechanism rather than a “Pull” mechanism – meaning, you can simply listen to and react to events from different Azure services and other sources without having to constantly poll into each service and look for events. Azure Event Grid is definitely a game changing feature from Microsoft in the #Serverless space.

The best example where you can use Azure Event Grid is to automatically get notified when any user makes a slight modification to the production subscription, or when you have multiple IoT devices pumping telemetry data.

Azure Event Grid Connectors for Logic Apps

At present, there is a Azure Event Grid Connector with only one trigger – Azure Event Grid – When a resource event occurs. You can use this connector to trigger events whenever a resource event occurs.

The Logic Apps team is also working on adding a new connector – Publish Event which will be rolled out shortly. Using this connector, users can publish events (e.g., all events related to Serverless) into the Event Grid.

Custom HTML and CSV headers – If you have an array of data (example, #Serverless on Twitter), you can easily convert the information into a CSV document or HTML table by using the “Create CSV Table” action. Later, you can pick up this CSV table and easily embed to an email.

Enable Log Analytics from Create – More easier way to enable Log Analytics by toggling the status while creating the Logic App. You no longer need to go to the Diagnostics section to enable Log Analytics. Check out this detailed blog post that shows how you can enable Log Analytics while creating the Logic App.

OMS Workspace Dashboard – Create a global dashboard for all the available Logic Apps under your subscription. View the status of the Logic App, number of runs and additional details. Check out this blog post on how you can integrate Azure Logic Apps and Log Analytics.

Peek at code view – Say, you are working with Logic Apps and you add a connector. From now, you can easily switch between the code view and designer view by clicking “Peek code” from the Options drop down (….).Note: At present, the Peek code is available only in Read-Only mode. If you wish you need to edit the code directly from here, you can send the Logic Apps team a feedback on Twitter or through User Voice.

Advanced Scheduling in the Logic Apps Designer – There are new options to schedule the Logic App execution on a Daily and Weekly basis. This was available in the code view but now you can get this experience right in the designer. Monthly update will be rolled out soon!
In the Schedule trigger, you will notice that when you click on Week, there are few advanced operations available for you to define when you want the trigger to execute during a week. Say, you want your trigger to execute every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9:35 AM, 1:35 PM; 5:35 PM. The below screenshot depicts the example. The preview section will display the actual Logic App trigger condition based on the previous selections.

New Connectors

Azure Table Storage – This was one of the second most sought after connector from the community!

Azure Event Grid

Azure Log Analytics

Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Microsoft StaffHub

MySQL (R/W)

ServiceNow (East US 2 region)

Amazon Redshift

DocFusion 365

What’s in Progress?

As usual, another long list of features that the Logic Apps team is currently working on and should be available in the coming weeks.

Concurrency Control (code-view live) – Say, your Logic App is executing in a faster way than you want it to actually work. In this case, you can make Logic Apps to slow down (restrict the number of Logic Apps running in parallel). This is possible today in the code-view where you can define say, only 10 Logic Apps can execute at a particular time in parallel. Therefore, when 10 Logic Apps are executing in parallel, the Logic Apps logic will stop polling until one of the 10 Logic Apps finish execution and then start polling for data.NOTE: This works with the Polling Trigger (and not with Request Triggers such as Twitter connector etc) without SplitOn enabled.

Custom Connectors – Get your own connector within your subscription so that your connector gets shown up on the list. This is currently in Private preview and should be available for public in the month of September.

Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP). This is almost ready for release!

SOAP – Native SOAP support to consume cloud and on-premise SOAP services. This is one of the most requested features on UserVoice.

Variables (code-view live) – append capability to aggregate data within loops. The AppendToArray will be shipped soon, and AppendToString will come in the next few weeks.

Expression intellisense – This functionality will go live on August 25th. Say, if you are typing an expression, you will see the same intelligent view that you see when you are typing in Visual studio.

Expression Tracing – You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions

Foreach nesting in the designer – This capability will soon be incorporated into the designer in the coming few weeks.

Foreach failure navigation – If there are 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 10 of them failed; instead of having to look for which one actually failed, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.

Functions + Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. This functionality will be going live by end of August.

Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way

Time based batching

Upcoming Connectors

Workday

Feedly

SQL Triggers (available in East US today but will be available across other regions in a few weeks)

Watch the recording of this session here

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.

INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft will be delivering the keynote speech.

New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017 – A first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Here’s a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

Also check out this blog post that should get you convinced on why to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event: Read blog

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote - “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”.
View all posts by Sriram Hariharan